Caracter y Destino

(1957).
American Imago, 14(2):89-110

Character and Destiny(+)
Heinrich Racker, Ph.D.
In the mystery of the unity of the ego and the world, of being and
happening, in the perception of the apparently objective and
accidental as a matter of the soul's own contriving, I see the
innermost, core of psychoanalytic theory.
Thomas Mann: Freud and the Future.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
To talk to the Friends of Psychoanalysis on character and destiny may
seem a superfluous undertaking. Whoever has approached psychoanalysis or,
even more, has undergone psychoanalytic treatment has shown thereby that he
knows, or is at least intuitively aware, how closely interconnected are inner
and outer things, the psyche and the course of life, personality and events. For
he has associated himself with a science or technique that directs its attention
to a very preponderant degree to man's interior and sees here the prime mover
of his life in general. Not only have mind and body drawn nearer to each other
through this new science, so much so that one even hears it said that to
differentiate them is a prejudice,—a view that has already been expressed in
other periods of the history of the human spirit, but now rests on the amazing
discoveries of psychosomatic medicine; not only mind and body, I say, but
also other aspects of “inner” and “outer”, viz. the ego and the world,
character and destiny, have drawn nearer together in an amazing manner. Here
again we may ask ourselves whether their differentiation—in the usual way—
does not entail a prejudice, in view
—————————————
(+) Lecture delivered to the Friends of Psychoanalysis, at the Argentine
Psychoanalytic Association, in 1956.
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of our knowledge of their intimate connections, which induces us to regard
them as two aspects of one unity, as two faces of the in-dividuum, or else to
see the true centre in the interior and consider exterior events as an
expression, creation or derivative of the psyche. Just as we now know, for
instance, that stomach ulcer is the outcome of unconscious wishes and fears,
we also know that a disastrous financial situation may be traced back to
unconscious guilt feelings. In both cases we are dealing with a manifestation
of the psychical and internal in the material and external.
I have said that you will certainly be familiar with these connections and I
should, therefore, give grounds for my choice of this subject. But these will
make themselves apparent from what follows. Here it is perhaps enough to
remember that our knowledge of certain facts meets with inner resistances,
which oblige us to a repeated “working through”, if the theoretical
understanding is to become real and our “knowing” transformed into “living”.
So I am offering this exposition as an invitation to work through yet again
something with which in principle you are already acquainted.
I
From the very start, psychoanalysis has directed its attention on the
relationship between a person's inner world and what we call his destiny. I
wish to stress here already that in speaking of destiny I mean not only what
we experience but also how we experience it, since it is the what and the
how, and their interconnections, that make up our destiny.
In both aspects psychoanalysis has contributed towards a better
understanding of this age-old problem. Freud first refers to it in his
“Interpretation of Dreams”, when speaking of Sophocles'. Oedipus, termed a
“tragedy of destiny”, and shows how the fate of Oedipus is brought about by
his unconscious impulses. The discovery of the unconscious mind opens the
way to a new scientific outlook on human destiny. The gods change their
dwelling-place, forsaking
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the heavens to abide in the interior of man and press upon him—as instincts—
from within instead of from without. Shortly after, in his “Psychopathology of
Everyday Life”, Freud shows how a whole series of acts, which are usually
called ”accidental” are likewise determined by the unconscious. In this way
psychoanalysis takes possession of part of what was formerly assigned to the
sphere of chance i. e. once again of things external and foreign to man, and
appropriates them for his inner world by pointing out that it is there that they
have their true origin or “determination”. In particular, Freud found that we
frequently create a specific “destiny” out of a need for punishment or a fear of
suffering one. In the latter case we try to “conjure our fate” by, for instance,
losing some valuable object in order to forestall another and graver loss.
Genetically this fear of punishment referred to our parents, towards whom
we felt guilty. Hence they constitute our primary image of destiny. This is, in
other words, a projection of the parents, who have become, for our surface
thought, impersonal or super-personal. In the case of the boy, destiny,
according to Freud, is above all the projection of the father who threatens to
punish him for his oedipal desires. You know that psychoanalysis speaks of
the ”inner” parents, especially when referring to the conscience, which it
takes to be a result or “precipitate” of the emotional and instinctual
experiences the child lived through with his parents, and you know that it
calls it the superego. Thus Freud finally defines the powers of destiny as a
projection of the superego, both in its threatening attributes and in its
protective ones.
Summing up and uniting the various aspects of the question: a great deal of
what has been regarded as destiny or chance springs from the unconscious,
from one's own repressed impulses. These find expression in two directions:
on the one hand, from the subject to the objects, as, for instance, in Oedipus,
in killing his father and marrying his mother; and on the other hand, from the
objects to the subject, from the inner parents to the ego, which also generally
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remains unconscious, but becomes manifest, for example, when Oedipus puts
out his eyes, punishing himself and appeasing the wrath (the aggressive
desire) of the inner father and of the gods, and so fulfilling his “destiny”. The
impulses of the inner parents are as a rule identical with those of the subject.
The wrath of Oedipus'. inner father must have been equal to the wrath of the
little Oedipus against his father. The deep images of one's parents are
modelled on one's own instincts and feelings although the latter have of
course undergone the influence of the real parents.
In one of the works of his last period, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”,
Freud points out yet another factor that rules our destiny: repetition
compulsion. This at times even outweighs the powerful pleasure principle.
Freud cites as an example the analytic situation in which each patient repeats
with the analyst the libidinal experiences of his infancy, however painful
these may have been. Moreover, not only in the sick but also in so-called
normal people is this repetition compulsion to be observed: men for whom
every friendship ends with the friend betraying them, benefactors who keep
complaining of the ingratitude of their protégés, lovers whose relations with
women pass through the same stages every time and come to the same end,
etc. “We see little to wonder at,” says Freud, “in this ‘eternal return of the
same’ if it refers to the active behaviour of the person in question, and if we
find that a constant character trait must needs express itself through a
repetition of the same experiences. We are far more impressed by those cases
in which the person seems to undergo passively something over which he has
no influence, experiencing, nevertheless, again and again the repetition of the
same fate. Take, for example, the case of the woman who, three times running,
married men who promptly fell ill and had to be nursed by her until their
death.”
I should like to add here a contribution to this problem made by one of
Freud's most outstanding disciples, Melanie Klein. According to her opinion,
one of the factors originating
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the repetition compulsion is the pressure exerted by anxiety situations dating
back to our earliest childhood which continue to exist in the depths of the
psyche. M. Klein refers herewith to persecutory and depressive anxieties and
feelings of guilt whose existence forces us continually to repeat the same
conduct towards ourselves and towards others so as to defend ourselves from
dangers phantasied in early infancy. I shall return to this later and clarify it
with examples.
Up to now I have been summing up, on broad lines, what psychoanalysis
has contributed towards our understanding of the genesis of the notion of
“destiny” and our understanding of some factors that co-determine the
gestation of destiny and originate, or co-originate, what we experience.
Let us now see—also in brief synthesis—what psychoanalysis says about
the other aspect of destiny, namely, how we experience what we do
experience. The decisive importance of this aspect is evident. Any situation
readily lends itself as illustration. All of you here and now are, in a certain
respect, sharing the same destiny: you are in the same hall, listening to the
same lecture. But each one of you is experiencing it in a different way,
depending on several factors, but above all on the spirit in which he is
listening. Psychoanalysis teaches us in this regard that this spirit is determined
in great part by the unconscious. Insofar as you see, for example, the man in
me, the spirit in which you listen will be influenced by your relationship with
your father and brother. But I am also someone who is “delivering” a lecture
i.e. who is showing you a production of his, a spiritual offspring, and this will
represent, for the unconscious, the image of a mother delivering a child. So
that, quite unknown to you, your attitude may also be co-determined by
feelings towards your mother. I have said before that my image is confused, to
some degree, with that of your father, that is to say, present and past become
confused, for I refer to the image of your father in your childhood days, and
this interweaving of present and past is another characteristic of our
experience of destiny in general. Further-more
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you did not have only one single image of your father, but many and
sometimes contradictory ones, and through one circumstance or another,—
perhaps even remote from the lecture—for one of you I may now be standing
for the loved father; for another, the hated father, an esteemed one or a
despised one, rich or poor, feared or sought-after, etc.
In synthesis we may say that how we experience things depends of the
feelings, wishes and fears with which we set out to meet the world, all of
which are intensely coloured by our unconscious.
There is one point, however, on which I must still dwell a moment in view
of its great theoretical and practical importance. You know that these
impulses and feelings with which we set out to meet the world are not
accepted in their totality by our Ego. Many of them provoke anxiety, they
seem dangerous and we defend ourselves against them. The various ways in
which we reject them are called defence mechanisms. You know them, for
instance, as repression (which is rejection from the conscious), as projection
(which is placing and seeing in somebody else what is our own), as
introjection (which is placing in ourselves what belongs to somebody else),
etc. It is clear that these and other mental mechanisms modify our image of the
world, of the people around us and of ourselves, and co-determine, then, how
we experience this world. We shall later see how far what we experience
also depends on these mechanisms. Thus, for example, the repression of the
early sexual impulses and object-images renders it difficult or even
impossible to find a sexual partner, either in a concrete sense so that the
person remains alone, or in a psychological sense so that he is unable to
derive proper enjoyment from erotic union. In general terms, we shall study
the relations existing between the individual's inner and outer worlds.
But here, on account of the special part it plays, I should like to draw your
attention to one mental mechanism which, perhaps, we have not yet
appreciated in its full bearing. I refer to projection. You will have heard
speak
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of it as a pathological defence, particularly marked in paranoia. The person
who suffers from persecution mania has projected his own hatred onto others
and therefore feels threatened by them; the person who suffers from jealousy
mania has projected his own unfaithful hetero- or homosexual desires onto the
object of his suspicion, etc. The guilt feelings over these tendencies prevent
the patients from recognizing them as their own and induce their projecting
them onto other people. In this way their world becomes a hell, this being the
destiny originated by their guilt feelings.
I must stress at this point that I am not only referring to grave cases. We all
suffer, to some degree, from these same paranoid anxieties, for we all harbour
the same guilt feelings against which we defend ourselves by projecting onto
others what we cannot endure in ourselves. Indeed, observation shows, for
instance, that every fit of anger is preceded by paranoid anxiety. In the
persecutory phantasy, by which this anxiety and the subsequent anger are
provoked, there always intervenes the projection of our own aggressiveness.
The guilt feelings that accompany our feelings of being bad are what bring
about the expectation and fear that something bad will attack us from outside.
Needless to say, this does not signify that evil and aggression do not exist
outside; it would be equally psychotic to believe such a thing. It only means
that the world's aggression provokes the more anxiety and resulting hate, the
more we have rejected from our conscious the existence of our own
aggressiveness. In other words, my outer world or destiny becomes the more
dangerous and painful, the more I reject certain parts of my inner world by
projecting them outside.
In this sense we increase the badness of our images of the beings around
us, we exaggerate it owing to our pathological need to project. Projection,
however, is not solely a pathological mechanism. On the contrary, its role is
of prime importance in our psychological life in general, in many of its
healthy aspects and even in the most lofty. Freud himself had already
emphasized that our sensory perception
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of the world also involves projection, for the impressions we receive, which
enter into us, are once again placed outside, that is to say, they are projected.
In reality, what we place outside in this way is something belonging to our
ego, to our psycho-physiological organism. “Well then, what holds good for
our perception of the physical world, also holds good for any other kind of
perception. If this is true, it means that all knowledge of the world is based
on a projection of our ego.
With this statement I have anticipated one of the main theses that I intended
to set forth to you since it is closely related to our subject. But first I must
develop, step by step, the grounds for arriving at this conclusion and then
what we may deduce from it regarding the problem that concerns us today.
Let us consider, in the first place, some examples from the psychological
world. If we perceive in another person, through his words or behaviour,
some modality of his character or some impulse or feeling, whatever it may
be, this is always because we ourselves, to a greater or lesser degree, have
the same modality, impulse or feeling. How, for instance, could an analyst
perceive what is going on in the analysand, if he did not know of the same
thing through himself, be it love or hatred, self-confidence or inferiority
feelings, generosity or envy? Every perception of what is taking place
psychologically within another human being is based on the following
processes: first we let the other enter into us or we take him inside, a
mechanism that psychoanalysis calls introjection. What has entered sets in
vibration sympathetic chords within us, just as a musical tone provokes
vibration in the sympathetic chords of a piano. When we are actively bent on
producing this resonance, we speak of empathy (Einfühlung), i.e.
identification. The example of the piano also illustrates that a precondition of
identification is pre-existing potential identity. Only when there takes place
this re-cognizing of the other in oneself, this—usually unconscious—
recognizing the other as oneself, can one perceive any psychological trait in
him. If I
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say, So-and-so is proud or modest, it is because I have recognized in him my
own pride or my own modesty. Even the degree of pride or modesty I have
perceived in him is the degree of my own pride or modesty, although it may
be latent and potential in me while in him it is at the moment manifest and
actual. This identification is evidently followed by something more. For I
have said, “So-and-so is like this or like that” i.e. I have once again placed in
him what I had perceived in myself; I have projected my own pride or
modesty into him anew. Naturally, it depends on the state of my inner “piano”
how I reflect the sounds that come from outside. If my piano has some
“screws loose”, the chords will not resound or they will reproduce the sounds
in a distorted fashion. But at any event it is only by projecting our own world
that we perceive the world of others, whether this perception be exact or
falsified.
We thus arrive at the conclusion that one cannot see or know anything in
the world other than oneself. What we accept in it and what we reject in it,
what we admire and what we despise are, in the last resort, parts of
ourselves, good and bad. The difference between any one of us and the others
lies, above all, in the fact that they fulfil one aspect or another to a greater or
a lesser degree, that they convert into reality different latent potentialities
common to us all.
In this psychological sense we have to say that the world of each one of us
is nothing but oneself. Through analysis this may be easily confirmed. The
experience a man has, for example, of a woman is, above all, the reflection of
his own femininity; the image he has of her is, basically, the image of his own
feminine part. A man who cannot love his wife is unconsciously seeing in her,
for example, a vampire. This vampire is himself; it is one part of his
personality. In this sense we have to say that each one of us is married, in the
last analysis, to himself, for better and for worse. And what holds for
marriage holds for all other human relationships. These represent a large
portion of our “destiny”. Our children, to take another example, are
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ourselves in our infantile part. We accept and reject in them, more than
anything, what we accept and reject in our own feelings and impulses towards
our parents. And even these, from the very first images we form of them, are a
reflection of our own emotions and instincts, which interpret, mould and co-
determine all the external impressions we receive. Thus it follows that
proportionately as our relations with ourselves change, our relations with
others change as well. The man, for example, who becomes fully conscious of
his “vampire” part need no longer project it onto the woman. So she changes
for him and he can love her better spiritually and phsysically.
II
Psychoanalysis thus affords scientific confirmation and deeper
comprehension of affirmations of age-old wisdom and philosophical currents
of all times. For instance, an ancient Hindu maxim is “Tat twam asi”,
meaning “This (i.e. All) is you” which affirms the essential identity of the ego
and the non-ego. The same is expressed in the inscription over the Temple of
Delphos that read: “Know thyself, and thus thou shalt know the Universe and
the Gods”. This idea contains, once again, the equation I = All; the
microcosmos is equal to the macrocosmos. In medieval mystical lore this was
expressed in the words “as within, so without”. Or, again, “only the like can
know the like”, that is to say, knowledge is alone possible where there is
identity between subject and object. And Goethe, versifying the philosopher
Plotin, says, “If the eye were not solar, it could never perceive the sun. And if
the might of God were not within us, how could we rejoice in things divine?”
Leibniz' theory of monads is another expression of the same idea, in
supposing an analogy between the universe inside each being and the universe
outside. And something similar is said by Schopenhauer in beginning his
principal work with the words “The world is my conception”. Moreover, in
another essay of his, bearing the title, “On the Apparent Intentionality
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of Individual Destiny”, we meet with the following idea: Just as in dreams
our will (psychoanalysis would say “the id”) appears as objective destiny
and everything originates from ourselves, each one of us being his theatrical
director behind the scenes, in the same way our destiny in reality (in the great
dream that one being, the universal “will”, dreams with us all) is the product
of our interior, our “will”. That is to say, we really carry out actively what
we appear to undergo passively.
Reflecting further on these ideas of the unity between the ego and the
world, between being and knowing and between being and happening, we
also attain a new understanding of some of the ethical concepts handed down
to us by these philosophical and theological schools. The basic ethical
principle of many of them is synthetized in the biblical “Love thy neighbour as
thyself”. The “as thyself” acquires, from the afore-said, a new significance,
namely “because thy neighbour is thyself”. Now if it is true that everything
we see in another is, in the last resort, ourselves, every rejection one makes
of another will be a rejection of something of one's own. The above ethical
exhortation is therefore based upon a concrete fact and, in this sense,
constitutes a recall to reality, or even, if you will, a rule of mental hygiene. In
“Civilization and its Discontents” Freud discusses this same ethical principle
and considers it an exaggerated and unrealizable demand. We agree with
Freud inasmuch as this principle is utilized by a cruel superego that exploits
this demand so as to torture the poor ego. On the other hand psychoanalytical
knowledge itself leads us to understand the reality upon which the principle is
based and induces us, therefore, to maintain it as an ideal though without the
severity with which a neurotic superego may require its fulfilment.
I wish to stress two contributions that psychoanalysis has made in the line
of these philosophical thoughts, two contributions of the first importance. One
of them, with which I have already dealt, is based on the discovery of the
Unconscious and consists in the fact that our understanding
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of the equation “The World = I” could be greatly deepened and enriched. The
second contribution in this respect is the outcome of the discovery of
psychoanalytic technique and constitutes no less than a decisive advance in
the realization of one of the oldest, deepest and most intense yearnings of all
mankind: I refer to the longing to change one's own personality and thereby
one's destiny, to overcome the everlasting return of the same, to break the
wheel of Ixion and gain the victory of freedom over internal compulsion. (I
may mention by the way, for it once again confirms a central psychoanalytic
concept, that to be bound for ever to a ceaselessly revolving wheel—by
which the Greeks represented the eternal and torturing repetition of the same
—was the punishment Jupiter imposed upon Ixion for having engendered the
Centaur in copulation with a cloud which had the form of Juno, i.e. the wife of
the father-god.)
Well now, what does psychoanalytic technique consist in? I will try to tell
it in as brief a form as possible and limit myself to the aspects that interest us
to-day. You will know already that the centre of analytic therapy lies in the
analysis of transference, that is to say, of the analysand's relationship with the
analyst, in which the former repeats his habitual conduct and also his previous
experiences. If we achieve certain changes in his relationship with the
analyst, we achieve them for all his relationships with the world.
How does psychoanalysis bring the changes about? You know already that
the analysand projects his inner world upon the analyst. He projects his own
tendencies and parts and he projects the images of other persons upon him,
especially those of his parents. These images have already been, in their turn,
impregnated with his own tendencies and parts. In thus projecting his inner
world upon the analyst, he does not do, in essence, anything different from
what he does in his relationship with anybody else. But now comes the
difference. As a rule people react to his attitude in correspondence to it, or as
a German proverb says: as one calls in the wood, so answers the echo. To
this there is added the fact that the response from the others is once
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again experienced by him in accordance with what he puts in the world and
hopes and fears from it, i.e. it is filtered by his own impulses. In this way
there arises a vicious circle—the eternal repetition of the same.
The analyst, on the contrary, does not respond by acting, but only
interprets. He does not enter the vicious circle but shows the analysand his
inner world, especially where his impulses refer to the analyst and where
inner and outer are confused with respect to the analyst. In this way the
analysand begins to differentiate better inner and outer, fantasy and reality,
past and present. Besides, the analysand takes into himself the figure of the
analyst, he assimilates his objective position and thus, on the one hand, he
gains more distance from himself and, on the other hand, he becomes more
reconciled with himself, he accepts within himself things he had formerly
rejected from his conscious, he becomes integrated, united with himself.
Thereby, he becomes at the same time more united with the world, for what he
had most rejected in this was what he had most rejected in himself. Dead
parts of him begin to revive and therewith parts of the external world are
likewise resurrected. The knowledge of, and union with himself open new
access to knowledge of, and union with the world. The vicious circle with
others breaks up little by little owing to this breaking the vicious circle with
himself, and this thanks to the fact that the analyst had not entered and formed
part of the analysand's vicious circle with the outer world, but had only
looked, and shown what he has seen. With the inner change, there comes a
change in how the analysand experiences the world and even in what he
experiences, since, along with the changes in his perception and knowledge of
the world, his being and doing change too. In short, together with the change
in his personality, his destiny begins to change.
I should like to show this from yet one other angle. The analysand was
about to shape his destiny with the analyst by following old tracks. This
destiny was composed of two factors: on the one hand, his impulses and
phantasies as
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regards the analyst (according to which the latter loved him or hated him,
etc.), and, on the other hand, what he really provoked in the analyst's feelings
towards him. For, naturally, the analyst feels the treatment he receives from
the analysand in great part in objective accordance with whatever this may
be. But the analyst is divided into two: one who feels this treatment and
another that utilizes all these feelings as instruments of his work, to point out
to the analysand what is happening inside the latter. This division of the
analyst into one part that feels, that responds with ordinary emotions, and the
other that knows, which is rational but at the same time has true affection for
the analysand, and without anxiety or anger, observes, identifies himself,
understands and interprets,—this division, then, is what enables the analyst to
become, to some degree, the master of the analysand's destiny with the analyst
and also the master of his own destiny with the analysand. I say “to some
degree” for this mastery over destiny is limited by the forces that oppose it,
both from within the analysand and from within the analyst. But in the measure
in which the change of inner and outer destiny is attained, something has been
achieved of that deep longing of mankind.
We call it “cure”, for psychoanalysis began as a therapy of the psyche and,
predominantly, continues to be such. But at the same time it has discovered
the causes of the sufferings and developmental disturbances of man in general
and has more and more become a path and a technique of human
transformation and evolution. Other historical ages have designated this
aspect and aim of psychoanalysis in more mystical and even ecstatic terms,
such as, for instance, the romantics in expressing their nostalgia for the
“miracle of love” or the Christians in speaking of “redemption” or “grace”.
But in essence the aim in mind is the same, that of liberation from the wheel of
Ixion. If the “original sin” was really—as Freud states and psychoanalytic
experience confirms—the oedipal crime, one understands that psychoanalysis,
in helping the analysand to overcome this complex, also helps him to obtain
this very “redemption”, i.e. liberation
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from the consequences of that “sin”. We would also say that the new
conception of god introduced by Christianity—the god of grace—corresponds
to a new conception of the human ego, namely, the discovery of the possibility
latent within him of changing his inner and outer world. And we also
understand why love of one's neighbour should have been chosen as the key to
this transformation, for this is, in essence, nothing other than love for oneself,
which is the foundation of the knowledge and transformation of oneself and
one's own “destiny.”
To give a brief illustration. If one of us has not accepted in his conscious,
for instance, his desires to steal, his world may become peopled with thieves
who are out to steal from him. Of course, thieves there always are, and
psychoanalysis in no sense denies this. But what happens to the person who
has not made conscious the thievish part of his own nature is the following: In
the first place, he is ready to see thieves even where they do not exist, i.e. he
makes the reality, in his phantasy, into worse than it is. In the second place,
through his need of seeing and pointing out thieves in those around him, he
tends to let himself be robbed and even provokes people to steal from him,
that is to say, he makes the reality, in reality, into worse than it is. In the third
place, if he really happens to be robbed (in a material, emotional or
intellectual sense), he experiences this robbery with far greater intensity than
other people. A small theft becomes for him a catastrophe; a moderately bad
reality becomes, in his phantasy, immeasurably so.
Thus it is that we differentiate in each person an inner world and an outer
one, and we study their interrelations. The man we have been talking about
has, in his inner world, a thief who persecutes him and to whom he is
submitted. This inner fact originates in him a special predisposition towards
destiny, namely a special sensitivity to a certain destiny and a tendency to
bring it about through his actions. At the same time there arises a special
dependence on the external world, for he expects of it a greater protection
against the danger of being robbed. Fortunately, however,
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he carries within, him, besides thieves, also people who love him, appreciate
him, protect him, etc., and whom he can likewise place in the external world
and re-encounter there. You understand then why the analyst sees all the
reality, all the events the analysand tells him, as an expression of inner
processes. I repeat: he does not deny or disregard external reality, but he
concentrates on what—in the vision of it the analysand has formed—is an
expression of the latter's inner world, in the last analysis, of the analysand
himself. There also occurs the contrary of what I have just described in the
example of the man persecuted by thieves. We sometimes prefer to shoulder
all the evil of the world and see ourselves as devils, so long as we can feel
surrounded by angels. But in either case, the analyst tries to recognize, through
the analysand's image of the world, the analysand himself, to recognize,
through what is filtered, the filter, which is also what the analyst can modify
and what, at bottom, the analysand wants to modify, for this is why he came
for treatment. In this respect, the analysand is always talking about himself,
always telling us something of himself. His world, his objects, his destiny
are, in the last resort, himself.
The analyst has, in his work, a constant proof that the world, the other, is,
at bottom, oneself. For the analyst experiences the other, i.e. the analysand,
only as another, alien, non-ego when he cannot understand him, i.e. when
there appears in the other something the analyst has rejected in himself.
III
Just as we speak of “conversions” of psychological conflicts in somatic
disturbances, so can we also speak of conversions of psychological conflicts
in disturbances of destiny. The negative aspects of destiny are frequently just
another kind of “conversion neurosis”. I wish now, as the last point in my
exposition, to refer to this aspect of the analysis
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of destiny: no longer to how we experience but to what we experience.
Continuing the analogy between the relationship mind-body on the one
hand and ego-world, or character-destiny, on the other, I would say that in
referring to the pathological aspects of how we experience, we have been
dealing, before all, with the hypochondria of our experience of the world,
whereas we shall now be concerned with the conversions into destiny.
Besides introjecting in phantasy images from the world and projecting our
own, we actually burden ourselves or our objects with bad things or else we
actually cede to them or take from them what is good.
Psychoanalysis has shown how childhood experiences influence the adult's
destiny. But I should like to stress that the child himself is already creating,
in good part, the destiny of his own infancy. Once again this does not mean a
denial of the influence of the environment over us but only points out that each
child, according to his basic instinctive and characterological constitution,
creates different images of his parents and thus provokes different reactions.
Two children of the same parents not only are differently received but also
create different parents, first in their phantasy and then in reality.
When a female analysand tells us, for instance, that her father had been
very cold to her and to prove it relates the manifold frustrations she had
suffered, while at the same time another sister had been loved, then in most
cases things happened just as she says. The analyst's first feeling, in
identification with the analysand, may well be compassion for her and a
sharing of her condemnation of her father. But often we soon realize that it
was she herself, already in early childhood, who unconsciously brought about
this attitude of her father's. We realize this especially through her behaviour in
her relationship with the analyst, in which she repeats the history of her
infancy; we feel how she unconsciously seeks to provoke our rejection and
coldness too, and even does provoke it in the part of the analyst that responds
instinctively to the treatment he receives, i.e. in that part
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of his “counter-transference” which the analyst thereupon uses to understand
the transference, analyse it and modify its fate. Later the analyst also
understands the causes of this behaviour of the analysand's. It may, for
instance, be due to a need to defend herself against intense guilt feelings
towards her mother and the fear of the latter's revenge for her sexual desires
towards the father with the accompanying hostility to the rival. The attraction
the analyst-father exerts becomes a constant danger against which the
analysand defends herself by the rejection of her own feelings and impulses of
love and by the rejection of the analyst, thus provoking a like rejection in him.
This rejection on the father's part, by which she protects herself, is also a
proof of her innocence (her best alibi) and at the same time her self-
punishment. But the analyst does not enter into the game; he knows that, at
bottom, love and life are struggling for fulfilment and he tries to liberate the
analysand, now in her new infancy, from what is preventing her from
accepting, in her conscious and in her feeling, this part of her life.
Our tendency to see the origin of events outside, in others, or in fate, is
very strong. One might speak of a flight outwards. The analysis of certain
characters even produces, at the first moment, the impression that these
people have fate and nothing more, so extensively do they reject their own
personality. They seem to talk only about other people, never about
themselves. But the fact is, as I have said, that in talking about others they are
always talking at the same time about themselves.
The analyst, too, is at times in danger of perpetrating or of unconsciously
participating in this “flight outwards”. The recognition of this mechanism in
one of its aspects played a decisive part in the early years of psychoanalysis.
Freud's analysands would often relate happenings from their infancy,
traumatic events, upon which Freud based his first neurosis theory. Then there
came the day when he discovered that these events, in an appreciable part,
had never taken place at all. Freud was desperate and doubted about
- 106 -
the value of his whole research work, for having mistaken these phantasies in
his patients for reality. But he soon found the solution: these very phantasies
constituted the pathogenic reality.
Nowadays, the danger of the analyst's participating in the analysand's
“flight outwards”, in putting outside what is happening inside, lies rather in
another of the aspects of this same mechanism. Take, for example, the
following case. A young man brought to analysis, among other problems, that
of being tied to a financed who was suffering from a severe jealousy
paranoia. There was no doubt that his diagnosis was correct and also that he
did not give her any real external grounds for her jealousy. Nevertheless, he
did not want to leave her, for a number of reasons, especially on account of
the fact that she was very dependant on him and the separation would be a
catastrophe for her. At the beginning of the analysis, the analyst saw this love-
choice in part as bad luck, without connecting it in all its aspects with the
analysand's personality. He thought to himself that it would be better for the
analysand to separate from this girl and look for another fiancée, but he also
appreciated the analysand's reasons against the separation. In obedience to the
rules of analysis, however, he took good care not to influence the analysand's
decisions in either way. Nevertheless, after some time, the latter started a
love affair with another girl. At the commencement of this relationship, the
analysand suffered somewhat from jealousy, but this soon passed. On the
other hand, the new girl-friend now began to feel jealous of him and after a
few months she developed a veritable jealousy paranoia. At the same time,
the analyst began to understand the dynamics of this “fate”. Before falling in
love with the second girl, the analysand had drawn emotionally very close to
the analyst and had begun to feel intense jealousy in his relationship with him.
It was at this time that he became acquainted with the second girl At the same
time he started missing sessions and the analyst had almost disappeared from
his conscious associations. In his unconscious phantasies, however, he
pictured the analyst
- 107 -
as intensely jealous over his unfaithfulness. In this way it became clear how
the analysand was himself creating the fate that he seemed to be suffering
passively. His great fear of the violence of his own jealousy led him to
defend himself against his emotions by withdrawing from the person he
loved and whose love he had already provoked, becoming thus the victim of
the latter's jealousy. It seems likely, besides, that in his object-choice there
already intervened the unconscious perception that the persons in question
were strongly prone to jealousy which ensured him in advance of the
possibility of placing in them his own jealousy paranoia, a suffering he feared
even more than being subjugated by objects affected by this same disorder
and being tormented with reproaches for his unfaithfulness.
It is plain that such observations throw new light on many problems, as, for
instance, the question of divorce, for they indicate the danger of repetition if
no inner change has taken place. My limited time does not allow me to enter
into detail as regards this specific problem.
I should like, instead, to mention briefly another example to point out some
more aspects of the dynamics of destiny. An analysand complains bitterly that
nearly all the women with whom he had sexual relations were frigid. The
analysis of the situation showed, before all, his emotional conflicts with his
analyst-father, towards whom he adopted, as a result, a cold attitude himself.
His unconscious search for a frigid woman obeyed, as far as the past was
concerned, a need for punishment, as though his “inner father” were telling
him: “just as you did not love me, the man, neither do you deserve to be loved
as a man.” As far as the present was concerned, his search for a frigid woman
obeyed the law of affinity that consists in the attraction of like by like or, in
the terms set forth above: only where there is identity, can there be
knowledge. We may also adduce a repetition-compulsion, in view of a certain
coldness in the treatment the analysand had received from his mother. And in
the way the analysand presents his problem there is also a third aspect, one
concerning the future. “Do you think,” he had
- 108 -
asked the analyst, “there is any sense in my going on with my girl friend, as
she's so cold? Do you think there's any chance of her getting any better?” This
question signified, within the analytic situation, this other question, addressed
to the analyst: “Do you think that I can get over my coldness towards you?”
The third motive is then his seeking to overcome his present difficulty of
being unable to love the man, the inner father, and to love himself as a man, so
as to be able to find a woman outside who would love him as a man. So long
as the analysand could not see the problem inside himself, he inevitably
carried it outside and tried to solve in the external world a problem of his
internal world.
We can often trace the dynamics of destiny in the course of a single
analytic hour. An analysand may, for instance, start the session by expressing
a series of preoccupations about the well-being of some person near to him or
of the analyst. In his unconscious phantasy it was, as a rule, the analysand
himself who had harmed this person through his hatred. If we do not intervene
with interpretation and so help the analysand to bear his guilt feelings, face
his aggressive phantasies and accept them in his conscious, we may frequently
see that the next thing that happens is that the analysand becomes worried
about his own well-being, or he really becomes physically or psychically
worse during the session. An analysand who had been concerned about his
father's heart-disease, or one whose thoughts had been centered round his
father's death from a heart-attack, may begin to feel precordial pain. One who
had been worried about damage done to the relationship between his parents
or to the analyst's marriage may go home and quarrel with his wife. He thus
burdens himself with the damage, above all in order to protect himself
against the guilt feelings and fear of punishment, for he rejects these emotions
more than the punishment itself.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I must close. My intention has been, above all, to
point out how true it is, as Nietzsche says, that it is the character that makes
the destiny, and to point out how much of what happens is determined by what
we
- 109 -
are, and this, in turn, by what we perceive or do not perceive. And it is along
this path, in making us see and know ourselves better, that psychoanalysis sets
out to change our perception of the world and our relationship with it. Where
it achieves this, it changes at the same time our being and our destiny.
- 110 -
Article Citation [Who Cited This?]
Racker, H. (1957). Character and Destiny(+). Amer. Imago, 14(2):89-110
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(1957).

American Imago, 14(2):89-110

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